Is Pornography A Problem?
Sir, — Regarding Holman W. Jenkins Jr.’s “Pornography, Main Street to Wall Street” (February/March 2001), let me offer some real-world corroboration that something is terribly wrong. I just quit working at an excellent boutique video store. One of the reasons I had to quit was the porn room. I could no longer stand participating in what I call the “caligulafication of America.” Easy access to the most degenerate forms of pornography is turning regular men into their own private decadent Roman emperor.
And it is becoming increasingly degenerate — in the four years I worked at the store, it has gone from an emphasis on incredibly beautiful pneumatic blondes to freaks — i.e., midgets, fatties, and “trannies.” There is also a lot of “humiliation” porn — it is very popular. On the gay side of the room, I will not even tell you how young the boys of the “18 today” series from the Czech Republic look. You would throw up. Nice family men come in and rent three or four a day.
Dana Adler
Philadelphia, Pa.
Sir, — Jenkins seems to imply that there is something wrong with pornography, and yet he does not make the argument explicitly. So we are left to wonder what exactly is wrong with it? Does he object merely because he perceives it as immoral? Why does he think his personal objections, even if they are widely held, are relevant to public policy?
I suppose what troubles me about this article is not that Jenkins is offended by pornography. This is quite common. What troubles me is his presumption that thinking people will agree with him, agree without reading even the shortest explanatory preface to his indignation.
Especially curious is an indignation triggered by the extraordinarily private behavior of viewing images on a computer screen. I find it difficult to make the logical connection between this private (and thus presumably protected) behavior and community obscenity standards. The whole notion of community standards springs from court cases involving public places such as movie theatres, bookstores, and sex shops. Internet porn bypasses these. One cannot know the source nor the destination of the images. Hence it’s hard for me to see the state interest.
Unless, of course, Jenkins sees a state interest simply in mitigating the perceived immorality of pornography, or in preempting the “social pathology” he thinks it will likely engender. It is not clear whether this pathology will result from the making of the material (affecting the participants) or in the viewing of the material (thus affecting the observer). In fact, it is not clear exactly what forms he thinks this pathology will take.
He mentions, “being disgraced, arrested, or fired because of the discovery of a cache of porn,” but here, it seems to me, the damage results not from the behavior but from the poor fellow’s associates. Then Jenkins resurrects the so-called “gateway” rationale so often used against marijuana, i.e. marijuana may not be inherently harmful, but a small segment of users go on to use hard drugs. Substitute pornography as “gateway” and sexual addiction as “result” and you have Jenkins’s argument. However, one could find many precursors to a variety of calamitous “results” — match orange juice to car accidents or chocolate to having a strange obsession with Ava Gardner — there’s just no way of proving a causal link.
Given the increasing demand for porn products, the volume and ubiquity of it, I cannot help but wonder if what we at first view as social pathology will not soon emerge as a social norm. In fact, I wonder if the demand for erotic material has always been present, but, like the demand for cupholders in cars, it lay unrecognized and dormant until they became widely available. If acceptance of pornography does emerge as a social norm, I hope that the porn-loving majority remembers to show a tolerance for Mr. Jenkins’s aversion, lest he be viewed as socially pathological.
Bob White
Danbury, Conn.
Sir, — I feel conservatives should tread lightly when it comes to the subject of sex. A sure-fire way to lose elections is to be tagged as a judgmental prude. Look at the Clinton impeachment. Two of the most reviled men in the American morality scene were Anthony Comstock, who in the nineteenth century was a special agent for the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice and as such called George Bernard Shaw an “Irish smut dealer,” and Will Hays, who in the early twentieth century censored our movies.
Jenkins tries to distinguish between hard-core violence and hard-core pornography. I do not buy it. Both are fantasies. If, as the author states, the typical porn customer is a reasonably educated affluent male in his late 30s or early 40s, then he is not going to go out and ravish some fair damsel after watching a porn movie. Most people will realize that porn is a waste of time and money. Of course, one can become obsessed with porn just as one can become obsessed with gambling, drinking, watching tv, or shopping (as PBS recently indicated of Mary Todd Lincoln). Conservatives take enough abuse without being labeled spoilsports or bluenoses. Let’s take some of that energy used on worrying about porn and use it to enact tort reform or repeal the Davis-Bacon Act.
Bob Rutschow
Charlottesville, Va.
The author replies,
Mr. Adler’s letter provides new intelligence from the retail level of the expanding porn sector, including the growing tendency to satisfy what might be called niche tastes. Yet Mr. White is correct in noting that a fiery denunciation of porn is missing from my article, and Mr. Rutschow puts his finger on why. My goal, believe it or not, simply was to point out that the accessibility and diversity of the porn material now becoming available represents something new. Stopping it probably is impossible and emphasizing it too heavily is likely to rebound on conservatives in the form of unflattering stereotypes. Yet social consequences are bound to flow from the ubiquity of increasingly fetishistic erotic material, and I doubt many of them are good. One can be troubled by something even if one can’t stamp it out, and one can hope that if the majority feels the same way at least porn consumption won’t become a “social norm.”
Holman W. Jenkins Jr.
New York
